Coin Center with Peter Van Valkenburgh

Blockchain technologies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have not impacted the lives of most consumers today. The theoretical breakthroughs that blockchain enables will eventually happen–I will be able to pay 1 cent to a knowledge worker in Africa without having to pay a 5 cent transaction fee. My servers will be able to pay other servers for small compute jobs. We will have decentralized versions of sharing economy systems like Airbnb and Uber.

But first there are many infrastructure and policy issues to sort through. The technology is not quite there yet, and people running even simple mining operations are threatened by our current legal framework.

Coin Center is an organization dedicated to education of policymakers and media about blockchain technology. Peter Van Valkenburgh directs research at Coin Center, and joins the show to talk about the issues that stand in the way of that utopian dream of micropayments, IoT, and other blockchain miracles.

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